Economist Thomas Piketty points the way for the Labour Party to win back votes
from its traditional supporters

This is a tale of two messiahs. The first is the French economics professor, Thomas Piketty, who is due in Britain today to deliver two lectures; the second is the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage. At an initial glance, the world’s most feted economist and the saloon-bar hustler have no common bond.

Mr Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, has earned him the label of a “rock star economist” in a taupe-coloured profession. His central message, that the capitalist system is pre-programmed to increase the gap between rich and poor, has demolished the Western myth that all who work hard can expect success.

Where Mr Piketty has shattered the American dream (and been rewarded by topping the US bestseller lists), Mr Farage has smashed British complacencies. While the Piketty prospectus fills 577 pages, the Farage manifesto (withdraw from Europe and bring back grammar schools) could be green-inked on a bar mat in the Dog and Duck. Piketty is beloved of metropolitan elites; Farage is their scourge. Yet, for all their differences, these prophets of broken dreams have linked agendas.

Both understand the politics of fear. As Mr Piketty points out, terrors over class and wealth distribution inspired the doom-mongers of the 18th century, including the Rev Thomas Malthus, who warned that over-population was the primary threat to mankind. In a world gripped once again by dread, Mr Farage’s anti-immigration message makes him the Malthus of his time.

In addition, both men grasp why people have shunned mainstream politics. Mr Piketty’s case – that the rich world is heading back to Dickensian levels of inequality – explains why Mr Farage, the self-styled defender of the downtrodden, is poised to humiliate the mainstream parties.

The common ground between these two celebrities is a quagmire for Ed Miliband. Although he is still reading the Piketty book, he is expected shortly to meet its author, who returns to Britain in a few weeks’ time to debate his thesis with Miliband’s own economic powerhouse, Lord (Stewart) Wood. Piketty fever should be a boon to Camp Miliband. The celebrated economist makes the case for the very issue – the battle to reshape capitalism – that Mr Miliband sees as his ticket to victory.

Instead, by bitter irony, it is Mr Farage who is surfing the wave of inequality. With Ukip now the narrow favourite to win the European elections, its leader is the beneficiary of the public’s anger at being left behind while the rich get ever richer. When Mr Miliband launches Labour’s campaign tomorrow, he will know that many of his allies think it possible or likely that Mr Farage will relegate him to second place. That result, leaving the Tories as also-rans, would deliver an ominous portent.

As Marcus Roberts, deputy general secretary of the Fabians, says: “Ukip can deny David Cameron the keys to Downing Street. But it can also deny Ed Miliband an overall majority.” That prospect has thrown Labour into disarray. Some leading figures counsel a cross-party attack on a “racist” Ukip, while others warn that insults merely benefit non-stick Nigel. Some argue that Labour easily trounced Ukip in the recent Wythenshawe by-election, while others rightly warn that a slickly managed city campaign cannot be replicated in coastal redoubts.

Even Mr Miliband’s wisest allies sound flummoxed. As one says: “Farage is drawing a line between him and everyone else.” Much as the Labour leader may try to shift the focus back to TV debates with Mr Cameron, Mr Farage continues, for now at least, to stake his claim with the blue-collar voters that Labour once forgot.

In the get-ahead Blairite era, with tribal voting at an end, Labour fixed its sights on the upwardly mobile middle classes. By 2011, with the road to Wigan Pier paved in gold and lined by Boden outlets, only 24 per cent of people chose to call themselves working class, compared with 67 per cent in the late Eighties.

But the anger and resentment of that rump should have alerted mainstream parties to what lay ahead. A vast new class has emerged, blue of collar and of outlook alike. These C2 voters, conservative on welfare and immigration and progressive in their antipathy to managers creaming off excessive profits, see their rents rising, their jobs in peril and their children’s chances shrinking fast.

These, if Thomas Piketty is right, are not the victims of a post-recession blip. For as long as the return on capital exceeds economic growth, inequality will stagnate or worsen, as Britain and France drift back towards the stratified society of Jane Austen and Balzac. Far from being an anachronism, Piketty’s people are tomorrow’s outriders and Farage’s future.

So when Lord Glasman, still a major force in Labour, tells Ed Miliband that his party is “too middle-class” and vulnerable to Ukip attack in its heartlands, then the leader and his allies take note. “Maurice has a point,” says one key lieutenant. The question is what Mr Miliband should do about it.

He could tack Rightwards, offering bromides on immigration and welfare to placate resentful voters, who may well ignore him and vote Ukip anyway. He can – and will – make some detailed populist pledges on cutting tuition fees and, probably, renationalising parts of the railway. But in the words of one leading MP used to hearing doorstep stories of a bygone and better Britain: “There is no policy answer to nostalgia.”

Far from being misplaced, that wistfulness puts Mr Farage’s target voters in the vanguard of economic thinking. His racist disciples may be loathsome and his isolationist strategy tantamount to economic and social suicide, but in one respect Ukip is right. For many people, yesterday was better, and the mainstream leaders should be more humble in conceding as much.

If he is to be the next prime minister, then Mr Miliband has to prove that progress offers hope. In taking inequality as his text, he can fairly claim to have led the world. The Pope, the British bishops and the IMF have all supplied an echo. His remedies do not, however, yet begin to match the robustness of the message. Reversing the long-established global trend that Mr Piketty outlines will take more than the odd eye-catching retail offer. “Vote Labour and Get a Tenner off your Gas Bill” is not a slogan to change the course of history.

Mr Cameron, for his part, cannot rely on a quickening recovery to alter hearts and minds. A report today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicts that, despite 1.5 million new jobs by 2020, one in four families will still live in poverty. The UK’s disproportionate number of low-skilled, low-paid jobs makes it easy for employers to hire cut-price labour, often from elsewhere in Europe.

Improving the skills of those at the bottom is a long-term venture, while bearing down on the excesses of the state (such as full-scale Trident replacement) and on the undeserving rich will surely provoke wails of protest. Mr Miliband should dare to court controversy. He may never achieve the rock-star status of Piketty and Farage, the unlikely troubadours of politics. But in order to win in 2015, he too would need the arts of a crusader.